#442 – Donald Trump Interview

29:32I said, can't do it. Don't do it anymore. We went 18 months before this happened. This horrible day happened. We went 18 months and nobody was shot at or killed. What do you think that was? The character of the stick in that case. And Afghanistan. The stick definitely was the threat of military force. That was the stick. It doesn't have to be, but that was the stick. Well, let me just linger on the election a little, a little bit more. For this selection, it might be a close one. What can we do to avoid the insanity and division of the previous election, whether you win or lose? Well, I hope it's not a close one.

30:09I mean, I don't know how people can vote for somebody that is destroyed our country, the inflation, the bad economy. But to me, in a way, the worst is what they've allowed to happen in our border, where they've allowed millions of people to come in here from places that you don't want to know about. And I can't believe that there's going to be a close election. We're leading in the polls. And it looks close, but I think in the end, it's not going to be a close election. What do you think is the right way to solve the immigration crisis is mass deportation? One of the solutions you would think about.

30:45Well, you've got to get the criminals out of your fast, right? The people from mental institutions, you got to get them back into their mental institution. No country can afford this. It's just too much money. You look at what's happening in New York and Chicago and LA and lots of places. And you take a look at what's happening. There's no country can afford this. We can't afford it. And we've got to get the bad ones out immediately. And the rest have to be worked on. You know, it's happened before Dwight Eisenhower was sort of a moderate president, moderate type person. But he hated when he saw people pouring into the country and they were nothing like now.

31:26You know, I probably got elected in 2016 because of the border. And I told people what was happening and they understood it. And I won the election and I won the election. I think because of the border, our border is 25 times worse right now than it was in 2016. I had it fixed to I had it the last week of my the famous chart that I put up was exactly that. You know the chart. When I looked to the right, I said, there's the chart being that was not a pleasant experience. But the chart that I put up said, and that was done by border patrol, that was the lowest number that we've ever had come into our country in recorded history.

32:10And we have to get it back to that again, we will. Let me ask you about Project 2025. So you've publicly said that you don't have any direct connection to nothing. I know nothing about it. And they know that too. Democrats know that. And I purposely haven't read it because I want to say to you, I don't I have no idea what it's all about. It's easier than saying I read it and you know, all of the things. No, I purposely haven't read it. And I've heard about it. I've heard about things that are in there that I don't like. And there's some things in there that everybody would like, but there are things that I don't like at all.

32:49And I think it's unfortunate that they put it out, but it doesn't mean anything because there's nothing to do with me. Project 25 has it has absolutely nothing to do with me. You posted recently about marijuana and that you're okay with it being legalized, but it has to be done safely. Can you explain your policy there? Or I just put out a paper. And first of all, medical marijuana has been amazing. I've had friends and I've had others and doctors telling me that it's been absolutely amazing, the medical marijuana. And we put out a statement that we can live with the marijuana. It's got to be a certain age.

33:39It's got to be a certain age to buy it. It's got to be done in a very concerted, lawful way. And the way they're doing it in Florida, I think, is going to be actually good. It's going to be very good, but it's got to be done in a good way. It's got to be done in a clean way. You go into some of these places like in New York, it's all, it smells all marijuana. You can't the way you've got to have a system with this control. And I think the way they've done in their Florida is very good. Do you know anything about psychedelics? So I'm not a drug guy, but every single day at Iowaska. Yeah. And there's a lot of people that speak to sort of the health benefits and the spiritual benefits of these different psychedelics.

34:26I think we would probably have a better world if everybody in Congress took some mushrooms, perhaps. Now, I know you don't, you stay away from all of that stuff. I know also veterans use it for dealing with PTSD and all that kind of stuff. So it's great. And it's interesting that you're thinking about being more accepting of some of these drugs, which don't just have a recreational purpose, but a medical purpose treatment purpose. So we put it out of statement today. We're going to put it on another one probably next week, be more specific. Although I think it's pretty specific. And we'll see how that all goes.

35:05That's a referendum coming up in some states, but it's coming up. And we'll see how it does. I will say it's been very hard to beat it. You take a look at the numbers. It's been very hard to beat it. So I think it'll generally pass, but you want to do it in a safe way. Speaking of marijuana, let me ask you about my good friend Joe Rogan. So he had a bit of tension with him. So when he said nice things about RFK Jr., I think you've said some not so nice things about Joe. I think that was a bit unfair. And as a fan of Joe, I would love to see you do his podcast because he is legit the greatest conversationalist in the world.

35:49So what's the story behind tension? I don't think there was any tension. And I've always liked him, but I don't know him. I mean, I've only seen when I walk into the arena with Dana and I shake his hand. I see him there. And I think he's good at what he does, but I don't know about doing his podcast. I mean, I guess I do it, but I haven't been asked and I'm not asking them, you know, I'm not asking anybody. Sounds like a challenging negotiation situation. No, it's not really a negotiation. And he's sort of a liberal guy, I guess, you know, from what I understand. But he likes Kennedy. This was before I found this out before Kennedy came in with us.

36:34He's going to be great. He's doing probably going to be great. But I like that he likes Kennedy. I do too. He's a different kind of a guy, but he's got some great things going. And I think he's going to be beyond politics. I think he could be quite influential and taking care of some situations that you probably would agree should be taking care of. The Joe Rogan Post is an example. I'd love to get your psychology about behind the tweets and the posts on truth. Are you sometimes being intentionally provocative? Are you just speaking your mind? And are there times where you regret some of the truths you've posted?

37:14Yeah, I do. I mean, but not that often. Honestly, you know, I do a lot of reposting. The ones you get in trouble with are the repost because you find down deep they're into some group that you're not supposed to be reposting. You don't even know those groups are good, bad, or indifferent. But the reposts are the ones that really get you in trouble. When you do your own words, it's sort of easier. But the repost go very quickly.

37:45And if you're it's worked out pretty well for me. I tell you, truth is very powerful. Truth. And it's my platform. And it's been very powerful, very, very powerful. Goes everywhere. I call it my typewriter. You know, that's actually my typewriter. What are you doing usually when you're composing a truth? Like are you chilling back on a couch? Couches, beds. Okay. A lot of different things. I mean, like late at night and just I'd like to do some later. You know, I'm not a huge sleeper. But whenever I do them, you know, past like three o 'clock, they criticize you the next day. Trump was there. True thing.

38:30Okay. Trump was true thing at three o 'clock in the morning. And there should be no problem with that. And then when you think about time zones, how do they know that you're like, you know, in a time zone, like an eastern zone. So, but but every time I do it after like two or three o 'clock, it's like, why is he doing that? But it's gotten, I mean, you know, the truth is become a very successful platform. And I like doing it. And it goes everywhere. As soon as I do it, it goes everywhere. The country seems more divided than ever. Yeah. What can you do to help alleviate some of that division? Well, you can get rid of these two people that terrible, they're terrible.

39:13You don't want to have them running this country. They're not equipped to run a Joe. Just Joe. It's a disaster. Okay. And Kamala, I think she'll end up being worse than him. We'll see. I think a lot's now, you know, the conventions over with. And I see I'm leading just about all the polls now. They had their little honeymoon period as a call it. And we'll see how that all goes soon. So for my personal opinion, I think you you are at your best when you're talking about a positive vision of the future versus criticizing the other side. Yeah. I think you have to criticize though. I think I think they're nasty.

39:56They came up with a story that I looked down and I called soldiers that died in World War One suckers and losers. Okay. Now at number one, who would say that? Number two, who would say to military people? Nobody. It was a made up story. It's just a made up story. And they like to repeat it over again. They know it was made up. I have 26 witnesses that nothing was said. They don't want to hear about that. Like she lied on McDonald's, she said that that she worked at McDonald's. It's not a big lie, but it's a big lie. It's so, you know, I mean, they just went and they checked. And unless she can show something, they don't talk about the presses are going to follow up with it, but I'll keep cameraing it.

40:44But she never worked at McDonald's. It was just a, you know, sort of a cool thing to say, hey, I worked at McDonald's, you know. But one of the worst was two days ago, I went to Arlington at the request of people that lost their children. They'll always be children to those people. You understand that. That's not politically incorrect as thing to say. The mother comes up, I lost my child, but you know, the child is a soldier and lost the child because of Biden and because of Kamala. Just as though they had the gun in their hand, because it was so badly handled, it should have been done at Bogrum, which is the big airbase.

41:26It shouldn't have been done at a small little airport right in the middle of town where people stormed it. It was a true disaster. And they asked me if I'd come and celebrate with them three years, three years, they died three years ago. And I said, I'm going to try, I got to know them because I brought them here actually. One night they almost all came here. And they said, I wonder if Trump will actually come and see us. I heard that we are, I came, so we stayed for like four hours listening to music up in a deck right upstairs. Beautiful. And then we're great people. So they called me over the last couple of weeks and they said, we're going to have a reunion or three years, would you be able to come?

42:16It was very hard for me to do it logistically, but I said, I'll get it done. And I got there. And we had a beautiful time. I didn't run away. I didn't, you know, I didn't just walk in, shake hands and walk out like people do. And I wasn't looking at my watch like Joe Biden does. And it was amazing. So I did it for them. I didn't do it for me. I don't need the publicity. I mean, I get more publicity probably than anybody. You would know that better than me, but I think maybe more than anybody, maybe more than anybody that's ever lived. I don't know, but I don't think anyone could have any more.

42:52Every time you turn on television, there's like nine different stories. All on different topics in the world. As an example, you interview a lot of people, good people, successful people. Let's see how you do with this interview versus them. Okay. I mean, I can tell you right now you're going to get the highest numbers you've ever had by sometimes a factor of 10. But, but when a gold star family asks me to come in and spend time with them. And then they said, sir, we did a ceremony and then we went down to the graves, which was quite a distance away. They said, sir, would you come to the grave?

43:39And then they said, when we were there, it's very sad actually, because these people shouldn't have died. They shouldn't have died. They died because of Biden and because of Kamala. They died because it's just like if they pulled the trigger. Okay. Now, I don't know if that's controversial to say, but I don't think it is. Afghanistan was the most incompetently run operation. I think I've ever seen military or otherwise they were incompetent. But the families asked me if I'd go. I did go. Then the family said, could we have a picture at the tombstone of my son and we did son or daughter? There was a daughter too.

44:18And I took numerous pictures with the families. I don't know if anybody else was in the pictures, but there were mostly families, I guess. That was it. And then I left. I spent a lot of time with them. Then I left and I get home that night and I get a call that the Biden administration with Kamala is accusing me of using Arlington for publicity. I was in use just the opposite. Just the opposite. And actually, did you see that it just came out? The families actually put out a very strong statement defending me. They said, we asked them to be there. Well, politicians and the media can play those games.

44:57And you're right. Your name gets a lot of use. You're probably legit, the most famous person in the world. But on the previous thing, in the spirit of unity, you used to be a Democrat. Setting the politicians aside, what do you respect most about people who lean left, who are Democrats themselves or of that persuasion, progressives, liberals and so on? Well, I respect the fact that everybody's in there. And to a certain extent, life is what you do while you're waiting to die. So you might as well do a good job. I think in terms of what's happening now, I think we have a chance to save the country.

45:43This country's going down. And I called it with Venezuela. I called it with a lot of different countries. And this country's going down. If we don't win this election, the election coming up on November 5th is the most important election this country has ever had. Because if we don't win it, I don't know that there'll be another election. And it's going to be a communist country or close. And there's a lot of people listening to this. Myself included that doesn't think that Kamala is a communist. Well, she's a Marxist. Her father's a Marxist. And she's advocating. It's a little unusual. Yeah. She's advocating for some policies that are towards the direction of Democratic socialism, let's say.

46:32But there's a lot of people that kind of know the way government works. And they say, well, none of those policies are going to actually come to reality. It's just being used during the campaign to grow cities that are too expensive. We need them cheaper. So let's talk about price controls. And that's never going to come to reality. It could come to reality. Look, I mean, she came out with price control. It's been tried like 121 different times at different places over the years. And it's never worked once. It leads to communism. It leads to socialism. It leads to having no food on the shelves.

47:06And it leads to tremendous inflation. It's just a bad idea. Whenever we use terms like communism for her, and I don't know if you know this, but some people call you a fascist. Yeah, they do. So I figure it's all right to call them a communist. Yeah, they call me a lot worse than I call that. They do indeed. It's just sometimes interesting, though. They'll call me something that's terrible. And then I'll hit them back. And they'll say, isn't it terrible? What Trump said? I said, wait a minute. They just call me. So I believe you have to fight fire with fire. I believe they're very evil people.

47:40These are evil people. You know, we have an enemy from the outside. And we have an enemy from within. And in my opinion, the enemy from within a radical left lunatics. And I think you have to fight back. Whenever there's a lot of fighting fire with fire, it's too easy to forget that there's a middle of America that is moderate and kind of sees the good in both sides and just likes one side more than the other in terms of policies. Like I said, there's a lot of people that like your policies, like your skill in being able to negotiate and end wars. And they don't see the impending destruction of America.

48:24You know, we had no wars when I was president. That's a big thing. Not since 78 years has that happened. But we had no wars when I was president. We defeated ISIS, but they were, that was a war that was started that we weren't anywhere near defeating. But think of it. I had no wars. And Victor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary, said the world has to have Trump back because everybody was afraid of Trump. Now, that's what he said. So I'm not using that term, but I think they respected me. But he said, China was afraid. Russia was afraid. Everybody was afraid. And I don't care what word they use.

49:00It probably that's even a better word if you want another truth. But let's use the word respect. They had respect for me. They had respect for the country. I mean, I ended the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the Russian pipeline. Nobody else could have done that. I ended it. It was done. Then Biden comes in and he gave it. He approved it. So we're defending German in these other countries for peanuts compared to what it's worth. And they're paying the person with defending them against billions and billions of dollars for energy. I said, how does that work? And we had it out with them and it worked out good.

49:38And they paid, they paid hundreds of billions of dollars. Well, you wouldn't even have a NATO right now. You wouldn't have NATO if it wasn't for me. As the leader of the United States, you were the most powerful man in the world. As you mentioned, not only the most famous, but the most powerful. And if you become leader again, you will have unprecedented power. Just on your own personal psychology, what does that power do to you? Is there any threat of it corrupting how you see the world? No, I don't think so. Look, I've been there for four years. I could have done a big number in Hillary Clinton.

50:13I thought it looked terrible to take the president's wife and put her in prison. She's so lucky. I didn't do anything. She's so lucky. Hillary is a lucky woman because I had a lot of people pushing me to, they wanted to see something. But I could have done something very, but I thought it looked so bad. Think of it. You have the president of the United States. And you also had Secretary of State, right? She was. But you're going to put the president's wife in prison. And yet when I got out, they have all these hoaxes. They're all hoaxes. But they have all these dishonest hoaxes, just like they did in the past with Russia, Russia, Russia.

50:55That was a hoax. The 51 different agencies or agents. That was a hoax. The whole thing was a hoax. The whole, there was so many hoaxes and scams. But I didn't want to put her in jail. And I didn't. And explain it to people. You know, they say, Locker, Rob Locker up. It does it. We won. I said, we don't want to put her in jail. We want to bring the country together. I want to bring the country together. You don't bring the country together by putting her in jail. But then when I got out, you know, they went to work on me. It's amazing. And they suffer from massive Trump derangements, syndrome, TDS.

51:43And I don't know if they're, it's curable from their standpoint. A lot of people are very interested in footage of UFOs. The Pentagon has released a few videos. And there's been anecdotal reports from fighter pilots. So a lot of people want to know, will you help push the Pentagon to release more footage, which a lot of people claim is available? Oh, yes, I would do that. I'd love to do that. I have to do that. But they also are pushing me on Kennedy. And I did release a lot, but I had people come to me and beg me not to do it. But I'll be doing that very early on. Yeah, no, but I would do that.

52:26There's a moment where you had some hesitation about Epstein releasing some of the documents on Epstein. Why the hesitation? I don't think I mean, I'm not involved. I never went to Ireland, fortunately. But a lot of people did. What do you think so many smart, powerful people allowed him to get so close? He was a good salesman. He was, you know, a hairline hearty type of guy. He had some nice assets that he'd throw around like islands. But a lot of big people went to that island. But fortunately, I was not one of them. It's just very strange for a lot of people that the list of clients that went to the island has not been made public.

53:17Yeah, it's very interesting, isn't it? Probably will be, by the way. So if you were able to, you'll be, yeah, certainly take a look at it. Now, Kennedy's interesting because it's so many years ago. You know, they do that for danger, too, because you know, it endangers certain people, et cetera, et cetera. So Kennedy is very different from the Epstein thing. But yeah, I'd be inclined to do the Epstein. I'd have no problem with it. Let's create to hear what gives you strength when you're getting attacked. You're one of the most attacked people in the world. I think you can't, you can't care that much.

53:57I know people that care so much about everything, like what people say, you can't care too much because you end up joking. One of the tragic things about life is that it ends. How often do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it? I have a friend who's very, very successful. And he's in his 80s, mid -80s. And he has been the exact same question. I said, I turned it around. I said, well, what about you? He said, I think about it every minute of every day. And then a week later, he called me, he said, tell me something. And he starts off the conversation by going tick, tick, tick, this is a dark, this is a dark person, you know, in a sense.

54:43But it is what it is. I mean, you know, if you're religious, you have, I think, a better feeling towards it. You know, you're supposed to go to heaven, ideally not hell, which is supposed to go to heaven if you're good. I think our country's missing a lot of religion. I think it really was a much better place with religion. It was some, it was almost a guide, you know, to a certain extent, it was a guide. You want to be good to people. Without religion, there's no real, there's no guardrails. I'd love to see us get back to religion, more religion in this country. Well, Mr. President, thank you for putting yourself out there and thank you for talking today.

55:23Look, I love the country. I want to see the country be great. And we have a real chance of doing it, but it's our last chance. And I appreciate it very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Donald Trump. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, as I've started doing here at the end of some episodes, let me make a few comments and answer a few questions. If you would like to submit questions, including in audio and video form, go to lexfreedman .com slash AMA, or get in touch with me for whatever other reason at lexfreedman .com slash contact.

56:02I usually do this in a t -shirt, but I figured out for this episode, I'll keep my suit and tie on. So first, this might be a good moment to look back a bit. I've been doing this podcast for over six years. And I first and foremost have to say thank you. I'm truly grateful for the support and the love I've gotten along the way. It's been, I would say, the most unlikely journey and on most days, I barely feel like I know what I'm doing. But I wanted to talk a bit about how I approach these conversations. Now, these conversations is its own unique puzzle, so I can't speak generally to how I approach these.

56:40But here, it may be useful to describe how I approach conversations with world leaders, of which I hope to have many more and do a better job every time. I read a lot of history, and I admire the historian perspective. As an example, I admire William Shire, the author of many books on Hitler, including the rise and fall of the third Reich. He was there and lived through it and covered it objectively to the degree that one could academic historians, by the way, criticize him for being a poor historian, because he editorialized a little too much. I think those same folks criticized Dan Carlin and his hardcore history podcast.

57:25I respect their criticism, but I fundamentally disagree. So, in these conversations with world leaders, I try to put out my historian hat. I think in the realm of truth and public discourse, there's a spectrum between the ephemeral and the eternal. The outraged mob and clickbait journalists often focused on the ephemeral. The current thing, the current viral shit stormer of mockery and division. But when the battle of the day is done, most of it will be forgotten. A few true ideas will remain. And those, the historian hopes to capture. Now, this is much easier said than done. It's not just about having the right ideals and the integrity to stick by them.

58:11It's not even just about having the actual skill of talking, which I still think I suck at. But let's say it's a work in progress. You also have to make the scheduling work, and set up the entirety of the environment in a way that is conducive to such a conversation. This is hard, really hard, with political and business leaders. They are usually super busy. And in some cases, super nervous because, well, they've been screwed over so many times with clickbait got your journalism. So to convince them and their team to talk for two, three, four, five hours is hard. And I do think a good conversation requires that kind of duration.

58:53And I've been thinking a lot about why. I don't think it's just about needing the actual time of three hours to cover all the content. I think the longer form with a hypothetical skilled conversation list, relaxes things and allows people to go on tangents and to banter about the details. Because I think it's in the details that the beautiful complexity of the person is brought to light. Anyway, I look forward to talking to more world leaders and doing a better job every time, as I said. I would love to do interviews with Kamala Harris and some other political figures on the left and right, including Tim Walsh, ALC, Bernie, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary, and on the right, JD Vance, Vivek, George W and so on.

59:41And on the topic of politics, let me say as an immigrant, I love this country, the United States of America. I do believe it is the greatest nation on earth. And I'm grateful for the people on the left and the right who step into the arena of politics to fight for this country that I do believe they all love as well. I have reached out to Kamala Harris, but not many of the others. I probably should do a better job with that. But I've been doing most of this myself, all the reach out, scheduling research, recording and so on. And on top of that, I very much have been suffering from imposter syndrome, with the voice in my head constantly pointing out when I'm doing a shitty job.

1:00:22Plus a few folks graciously remind me on the internet, the very same sentiment of this aforementioned voice. All of this, while I have the option of just hiding away at MIT, programming robots and doing some cool AI research with a few grass students, or maybe joining an AI company, or maybe starting my own, all these options make me truly happy. But like I said, most days, I barely know what I'm doing, so who knows what the future holds. Most importantly, I'm forever grateful for all of you, for your patience and your support, throughout this roller coaster of life I've been on. I love you all.

1:01:01Okay, now let me go on to some of the questions that people had. I was asked by a few people to comment on Pavel Durov arrest and on ex -being banned in Brazil. Let me first briefly comment on the Durov arrest. So, basic facts. Pavel Durov is CEO of Telegram, which is a messenger app that has end -to -end encryption mode. It's not on by default, and most people don't use the end -to -end encryption, but some do. Pavel was arrested in France on a long list of charges related to, quote -unquote, criminal activity carried out on the Telegram platform, and for, quote -unquote, providing unlicensed cryptology services.

1:01:46I think Telegram is indeed used for criminal activity by a small minority of its users, for example, by terrorist groups to communicate. And I think we all agree that terrorism is bad. But here's the problem. As the old saying goes, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. And there are many cases in which the world unilaterally agrees who the terrorists are. But there are other cases when governments, especially authoritarian and clang governments, tend to prop agandize and just call whoever's in the opposition, whoever opposes them, terrorists. There is some room for nuance here.

1:02:23But to me, at this time, it seems to obviously be a power grab by government wanting to have backdoor access into every platform so they can have censorship power against the opposition. I think generally, governments stay out of censoring or even pressuring social media platforms. And I think arresting a CEO of a tech company for the things said on the platform he built is just nuts. It has a chilling effect on him, on people working at Telegram, and on people working at every social media company. And also people thinking of launching a new social media company. Same as the case of X being banned in Brazil.

1:03:04It's, I think, a power grab by Elisandre Demarayas, a Supreme Court justice in Brazil. He ordered X to block certain accounts that are spreading, quote -unquote, misinformation. You on, and X denied the request, then Demarayas threatened to arrest X representatives in Brazil and in response to that, X pulled the representatives out of Brazil, obviously, to protect them. And now X, having no representatives in Brazil, apparently violates the law. Based on this, Demarayas banned X in Brazil. Once again, it's an authoritarian figure seeking censorship power over the channels of communication. I understand that this is complicated because there are evil people in the world, and part of the role of government is to protect us from those evil people.

1:03:53But as Benjamin Franklin said, those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. So it's a trade -off. But I think in many places in the world, many governments have leaned too far away at this time from liberty. Okay, next up, I got a question on AI, which I emotionally connected with. I'll condense it as follows. Hello, Lex. I'm a programmer, and I have a deep fear of slipping into irrelevance because I am worried that AI will soon exceed my programming skills. Let me first say that I relate to your fear. It's scary to have a thing that gives you a career and gives you meaning to be taken away.

1:04:40For me, programming is a passion. And if not for this podcast, it would probably at least in part be my profession. So I get an uncomfortable feeling every time Claude, the LMI, used for coding at this time, just writes a lot of excellent, approximately correct code. I think you can make a good case that it already exceeds the skill of many programmers, at least in the same way that the collective intelligence of stack overflow exceeds the skill of many programmers, many individual programmers. But in many ways, it still does not. But I think eventually, more and more, the task, the professional programming will be one of writing natural language prompts.

1:05:25I think the right thing to do, and what I'm at least doing is to ride the wave of the ever -improving, co -generating LLMs and keep transforming myself into a big -picture designer versus low -level tinkerer. What I'm doing and what I recommend you do is continually switch to whatever state of the R2 is for generating code. So for me, currently, I recently switched from VS Code to cursor. And before that, it was EMAX to VS Code switch. So cursor is this editor that's based on VS Code that leans heavily on LLMs and integrates the code generation really nicely into the editing process. It makes it super easy to continually use the LLMs.

1:06:11So what I would advise, and what I'm trying to do myself is to learn how to use it into master code generation capabilities. I personally tried to now allocate a significant amount of time to designing with natural language first versus writing code from scratch. So using my understanding of programming to edit the code that's generated by the LLMs versus sort of writing it from scratch and then using the LLMs to generate small parts of the code. I see it as a skill that I should develop and parallel to my programming skill. I think this applies to many other careers too. Don't compete with AI for your job.

1:06:49Learn to use the AI to do that job better. But yes, it is scary and some deep sort of human level, the threat of being replaced. But at least I think we'll be okay. All right, next up, I got a very nice audio message and question from a gentleman who is 27 and feeling a lot of anxiety about the future. Just recently, he graduated with a bachelor's degree and he's thinking about going to grad school for biomedical engineering. But there is a lot of anxiety. He mentioned anxiety many times in the message. It took him an extra while to get his degree. So he mentioned he would be 32 by the time he's done with his PhD.

1:07:33So it's a big investment. But he said in his heart, he feels like he's a scientist. I think that's the most important part of his message of your message. By the way, I'll figure out how to best include audio and video messages in future episodes. Now onto the question. So thank you for telling me your story and for submitting the question. My only story is similar to yours. I went to Druxley University for my bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degrees. And I took a while just as you are doing. I did a lot of nonstandard things that weren't any good for some hypothetical career I'm supposed to have.

1:08:12I trained and competed in Judo in Jiu -Jitsu for my entire 20s. Got a black belt from it. I wrote a lot including a lot of really crappy poetry. I read a large amount of non -technical books, history, philosophy, and literature. I took courses on literature and philosophy that weren't at all required for my computer science and electrical engineering degrees, like a course on James Joyce. I played guitar in bars around town. I took a lot of technical classes, many, for example, on theoretical computer science, that were way more than were needed for the degree. I did a lot of research and I coated up a bunch of projects that didn't directly contribute to my dissertation.

1:08:58It was pure curiosity and the joy of exploring. So like you, I took the long way home as they say and I regret none of it. Throughout that, people around me and even people who love me wanted me to hurry up and to focus, especially because I had very little money and so I had a sense like time was running out for me to take the needed steps towards a reasonable career. And just like you, I was filled with anxiety and I still am filled with anxiety to this day. But I think the right thing to do is not to run away from the anxiety, but to lean into it and channel it into pursuing with everything you got the things you're passionate about.

1:09:45As you said, very importantly, in your heart, you know your scientist. So that's it. You know exactly what to do. Pursue the desire to be a scientist with everything you got. Get to a good grad school, find a good advisor and do epic shit with them. And it may turn out in the end that your life will have unexpected chapters, but as long as you're chasing dreams and goals of absolute unwavering dedication, good stuff will come of it. And also try your best to be a good person. This might be a good place to read the words if by Roger Kipling that I often return to when I feel lost and I'm looking for guidance on how to be a better man.

1:10:30If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blame it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you but make allowance for their doubting too. If you can wait and not be tired by waiting or being lied about don't deal in lies or being hated, don't give way to hating. And yet don't look too good nor talk too wise. If you can dream and not make dreams your master, if you can think and not make thoughts your aim, if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposter just the same. If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken, twisted by naves to make a trap for fools, or watch the things you gave your life to broken, and stoop and build them up with worn out tools.

1:11:18If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss and lose and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss. If you can force your heart and nerve and sin you to serve your turn long after they're gone and so hold on when there's nothing in you except the will which says to them, hold on. If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue or walk with kings and lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, if all men count with you but none too much. If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that's in it and which is more you'll be a man, my son.

1:12:15Thank you for listening and see you next time.